by root

32. Even by the standards of the world’s best technology companies, WhatsApp runs lean. With only 32 engineers, one WhatsApp developer supports 14 million active users, a ratio unheard of in the industry. (WhatsApp’s support team is even smaller.) This L E G E N D A R Y crew has built a reliable, low-latency service that processes 50 billion messages every day across seven platforms using Erlang, an unusual but particularly well-suited choice. All that, while maintaining greater than 99.9% uptime, so users can rely on WhatsApp the way they depend on a dial-tone.

We know very few about their architecture.. What we know is that they care really about their work and… stay focused. For a GOOD product. A software, an App, a startup is not a nice wrapped package or an octopussian business model.

So is not only about getting things done.

Good luck 32! 🙂

PR: …and now we are happy to offer you a nerd moment: Scaling to Millions of Simultaneous ConnectionsSlides – Video

by root

“A 2006 survey by Pew Research found that 85 percent of teenagers online had a MySpace account. Today, only 7 percent of teens maintain an account there.” (nyt)

Evolution.. who knows? I bet yes, in 10 years Facebook will be there, but will change a lot, the fight to not become irrelevant happen at every new feature roll out… One day also Facebook will pivot and will be the most natural choice, un-noticed.

by root

I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.

by root

“…solution providers that focus on hardware and on-premise services need to find new sales people that understand the cloud and can sell based on business outcomes rather than specific products and speeds and feeds. “You want to get into the cloud?” she asked the audience of solution providers. “Fire all of your sales force”.

Maybe training and deep understanding of the new business in place would be sufficient! It’s a good provocation from a Gartner people, switching on cloud require specific competences il all organisation fields.

by root

Every day, thousands of startups are trying to make it easier for people to share 6-second video clips or bookmark photos of cats.

There is a world of enterprise software companies that modern startups are completely oblivious to. These enterprise software companies are making millions of dollars building the kind of technology solutions that the average startup would laugh at. It’s time this changed.

by root

The quest to draw useful insights from business measurements is nothing new. Big Data is a descendant of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” of more than a century ago. Taylor’s instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, timing and monitoring a worker’s every movement. Taylor and his acolytes used these time-and-motion studies to redesign work for maximum efficiency. The excesses of this approach would become satirical grist for Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” The enthusiasm for quantitative methods has waxed and waned ever since.

by root

Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. “You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you’re doing,” he said, “but you’re calm because you know you can handle your shit.”